2 Visitor Messages

The “tone troll” is a real critter, they are the most common subspecies of Internet troll, mostly harmless but extremely annoying, and easy to spot in the wild: they complain about the tone of a message, rather than its substance. They fixate on the allegedly poor attitude of anyone who challenges them. You can’t just have a difference of opinion with a tone troll: you will be declared dismissive, close-minded, arrogant, unprofessional, negative, or all of the above.

Tone trolls will see hostility even when it’s not there — equating disagreement with hostility is their defining trait — but they really get their knickers in a twist about any trace of actual snark, frustration, or contempt in the delivery of a point. Most tone trolls would deny this, but they act like emotion and personality are verboten in debate. A genuinely mean-spirited tone may be unpersuasive, but it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the validity of whatever is being said